


I am my mother's savage daughter (The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones)

by naivesilver



Series: Once upon a time there was (A king) - The Adventures of Pinocchio Remix [1]
Category: Le avventure di Pinocchio | The Adventures of Pinocchio - Carlo Collodi
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Banned Together Bingo, Banned Together Bingo Prompt: Immoral Situations, Coming of Age, Gen, Internalized Misogyny, Mentions of Violence, Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26569330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naivesilver/pseuds/naivesilver
Summary: Geppetto would have rather had a son.Pinocchio is born a girl, and sees the world in a different light.
Relationships: Blue Fairy & Pinocchio, Lampwick & Pinocchio, Pinocchio & Geppetto, Pinocchio & Original Female Character(s)
Series: Once upon a time there was (A king) - The Adventures of Pinocchio Remix [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932436
Kudos: 3
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	I am my mother's savage daughter (The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones)

“Are none of the others girls?” 

“Oh, no; girls, you know, are much too  clever to fall out of their prams.”

(Peter and Wendy, J. M Barrie)

Pina wonders, at times, which woman it is that Geppetto modelled her after.

All puppets are carved in the likeness of somebody else. This she knows for a fact, deep inside, just as she knows what hunger is and how badly she doesn't want to go to school. A childhood friend, a long-lost son, a master - there is always something inside a puppet's features that betrays the inspiration behind them.

Geppetto has never left the town, so he can't have gone far in his search. A neighbour, perhaps. A wife. A younger sister.

Pina doesn't know her name, but she hopes this woman's still alive, that she was one of those who lined the streets as was running through. She hopes there was outrage, for this stranger to feel, as she watched a little girl wearing her face wreak havoc around the village.

She hopes there was pride, too.

-

Geppetto would have rather had a son.

He doesn't say it out loud, but it's painted clear on his face, that he doesn't know what to make of a daughter. He's never had to guard his expressions in his own home before now, and he struggles under the curious gaze of this creature he made.

Oh, he tries, he tries quite hard - he sells his jacket so that Pina might go to school, so that she might learn to read and write before she's consigned to a kitchen and a broom. But he looks at her warily all the same, when he thinks she's distracted by something else.

Maybe he wonders how he'll be able to feed her in the coming months. Maybe he wonders how he'll rein her in, this girl that doesn't look the type to sit by the fire and knit.

(The fire has tricked her once already – it’s gotten her feet, but it won't get the rest of her, not while she's got breath enough to protest.)

And it is of no matter, anyway. Pina is gone before either can become a problem.

-

Women look out for little girls, at least.

Men don't do the same for little boys, it seems: they don't think there's any need for it, maybe, or maybe they feel it's the right thing to do, to make them ready for a world that will chew through them like the butter-soft chicken the Cat is devouring.

But women try - they wag fingers and tongues a-plenty, but at least they narrow their eyes when two grown animal-men cart around a small child like her.

The innkeeper's wife whispers in Pina’s ear, while she’s bending down to pour the Fox more ale, and asks her if she's scared, if these oafs want something from her.

Pina's terrified, somewhere deep down she refuses to acknowledge, but she doesn't say. She smiles as bravely as she can, instead, and rises for the toast her two companions are suggesting.

-

(She’s still terrified while she crosses the woods.

There are countless stories about girls walking into a forest never to return. The Cricket reminds her about them, over and over and over in his high and querulous voice, and asks her why she wants to get lost so badly.

Pina doesn’t want to get lost. She wants to prove the stories wrong. She wants to be brave – and she can be, she can, she can.

She repeats it to herself, chanting it like a prayer, up until she’s dangling from a tree branch, rope strangling the words in her throat.)

-

Young girls are supposed to be _beautiful_.

This Pina has always known, but she chose to ignore it, before. It served her no purpose, just like all that talk of hard work and duty did.

But she can't ignore the stab of jealousy that goes through her once she sees the turquoise-haired girl. She can't not hear the traitorous voice that whispers _This should be you_ in her ear, even through the fog of fever.

The girl dances around in a wispy dress that compliments her cascade of blue hair, and Pina feels her fingers raise to her own head, trying to card through the dark mop above it.

She cannot, of course - Geppetto had no money for a wig that wasn't his. Pina's hair was carved from the same log of wood that made her body, and it sits rigid and awkward instead of moving as she moves, painted black and brown in uneven patches.

She can't be beautiful, all sharp angles and mismatched limbs as she is. People will talk, once she's grown into a woman - if she ever manages to, that is. Puppets are meant to stay just as they are, empty-headed ugly little gnats.

She mourns this fact, and yet…

 _Fine_ , she thinks, fists clenched in the covers of her sickbed. _So be it_.

She bit off one of the assassins' hands last night, after all. She was hanged like a common criminal, and the fairy's servants look at her as though she deserved it.

Girls like that aren't beautiful. They're dangerous, and scary.

Pina wants the world to be scared of her. She's lived only a few days and it has scared her plenty of times already.

She doesn't tell the pretty, magic girl any of this, though. She drinks her medicine and lies, and leaves the house in the woods with unease twisting in her gut.

-

They put her into jail with whores.

It's not a word Pina's familiar with, and she rolls it on her tongue for the first few days after the Gorilla Judge condemned her to reclusion. She hears it often enough, but she doesn't dare ask what it means, lest she catches the attention of her angrier cellmates again. They steal half her meals and push her around enough as it is.

Men are locked away together, in jail, and so are women - Pina has never seen so many women in the same place all at once. And there's a great variety of them, too, old crones in for stealing bread and broad-shouldered wives of brigands, knocking elbows as they sit on the benches pushed against the walls.

The so-called whores are the oddest of the bunch, and they tend to stick close to each other, raising their chins in defiance when the others sneer at them. Some are girls not much older than Pina looks, while others are clearly more world-weary.

One's got hair of a vivid red, so bright it reminds Pina of fire. It scares her at first, but the woman’s belly is so big the puppet can’t help but stare at it in wonder. The stranger notices, after a while, and tells her that there's a child inside, one that'll come out sooner rather than later.

It's as though lightning had struck Pina then and there. It has never come to her to ask how children were made – she knows they can’t all be born puppets, because otherwise there would be little kids made of wood getting underfoot at any given moment. She had gathered she might be the only one. But to see it with her own eyes…

She tries to forget how abnormal she is, in the following days. She doesn’t want to think how odd her manner of birth was, or how much work Geppetto must have put into her, only to be rewarded with…well, this.

(She wonders if he’d like to have her back. She fears he does not, in the back of her mind, and that he’s only cursing the jacket he’s pawned off for such an ungrateful daughter.)

It's hard to ignore all of it with such a reminder before her eyes for weeks, though – and it’s only weeks because the woman gives birth a month and a half before they're freed, holding the hands of her peers as an older one looks between her legs. Her screams fill the cell until Pina wants to cover her hears, but she gets to hold the baby afterwards, sticky and wrapped in rags though it is.

It's a little girl. Her mother names her Ninetta, and her eyes shine when she tells Pina so.

The days pass. She still misses her father quite a lot, but there's warmth to be found, even in a jail. The women take her under their wings, tutting over her as they would the daughters they left at home, and she's sad to see them go, when freedom comes. She hopes they don't forget her as fast as she fears.

They don't, but they never have the chance to tell her.

-

Two or three of the whores could write, at least some. They taught her how to write her name, spelling letters on the dusty floor, and some other words too, the ones they needed the most in their job.

Pina dutifully repeats them, once the fairy's managed to get her into a school, because the teacher wants her to show what she knows. She writes them in uneven squiggles on the blackboard, and is sent home right after, for mocking the school and using vulgar language around her classmates.

Lampwick laughs when he reads them, and he laughs harder still when they're racing through the fields together, shouting those bad words at each other where nobody can hear as though it were a game.

(Children's games are rarely ever pure. And they are, in the end, just that - children in a world that wants to crush them under its feet.

Most people tend to forget that, when looking at them.)

-

The blue-haired girl is a woman now, and she's still as painfully beautiful as ever.

She also never seems to sleep, for she's always up sewing and sitting at the loom at night, when Pina is startled awake by bad dreams and paddles out of her room looking for help.

(She dreams of failing, more often than not. She dreams of having to stay a puppet forever, of having to return to an empty cold house as Geppetto is swallowed down by great sea monsters, and wakes up wracked by sobs.

She dreams of the rope around her neck, too, and of men wanting to use her for firewood, but this she tells no one. She deserved it, didn’t she? She deserved all of it.)

The fairy never scolds her for being up so late, perhaps sensing the nightmares still lingering around her. Instead she gathers Pina in her lap and goes on with her work, narrating every step she goes through.

Pina's wooden fingers aren't nimble enough to hold a needle, but the clacking of the loom and the low murmur of her adoptive mother's voice are enough to lull her back to sleep, and she's dozed off before she knows it, her head lolling on the fairy's shoulder.

It's as much comfort as she can get, and it reeks of duty still, of something she's still not good enough- not human enough- to know how to do.

She tries not to let it get to her, but it worms its way into her mind nevertheless, silent and insidious.

-

She still goes with Lampwick, that night.

There are words for girls who run around with boys - her friends taught them to her in jail, and Pina sees the townswomen hold them on the tip of their tongues, as they watch her roughhouse with the school’s problem child.

If they were better -if they were good- people would be waiting for them to grow up and get married to each other, like adults are supposed to. Fairy tales would have Lampwick be her knight in shining armour, or, for lack of that, her big bad wolf, come to whisk her away from the right path.

But Pina doesn't go with him because she's in love with him. That would be ridiculous - he's nothing more than what she is. A child. And an angry one at that, for all that life has tried to beat it out of them both.

The world isn't nice to angry children. Even less if those children happen to be girls - boys have the luxury of needing to be strong, but girls are expected to be prim and proper, the pride of their mothers and the heart of their fathers.

Pina is none of that, and Lampwick likes it about her: he's not her friend despite her boundless rage, or the way she juts out her chin and stands her ground, but _because_ of it. He thinks her naive, at times, but still he grins bright and wide when she elbows boys who try to torment her in the nose. There’s a land for children like them, he says, where she could kick and spit and bellow the bawdy songs all the boys sing in the streets and girls would be whipped for knowing.

She doesn’t follow him – she follows the treat he’s dangling in front of her. And perhaps it's a pity that she does, when she's so close to reaching her goal, but perhaps there's something more. Perhaps being human feels too much like the fire did, warm and tantalizing and with danger bubbling right behind the surface, ready to snatch away something she holds dear.

It's a good enough reason to turn her back to it, and a better one to let herself get lost.

-

There aren't many girls in the Land of Toys, but those that get there are just like her.

Pina screams and runs and dances along with the worst of them, and makes more friends that she'd ever thought possible, all tattered skirts and unkempt hair.

Lampwick is still the one she goes to, though, when donkey ears sprout among her dark wooden curls.

Lampwick is the only one she sees die, months afterwards, and it breaks her heart more than anything else has ever done.

-

They have her prance around in finer silks as a donkey than she ever wore as a puppet.

It’s humiliating to say the least, but it pales in comparison to what she feels later on, when she spots the fairy staring down at her with a sorrowful look on her face.

Pina almost welcomes the pain of her broken legs, if it means being distracted from the guilt she feels.

-

Her father does, in fact, want her back.

Perhaps he only wants an idealized version of her, the good girl she has the potential to become, but Pina doesn’t care. She flies into his arms, still soaking wet, and feels him hug back just as hard, as though he fears she’ll slip away again.

Proper little girls don’t peel off their outerskirts as not to sink down while they’re swimming at sea, but Geppetto seems to turn a blind eye to that, in the face of survival.

-

The farmer is more reticent to let her draw his water for him than he’d have been if she’d been a boy.

His wife has no such qualms, and she’s quick to set Pina to work around the house, scrubbing floors and hanging the laundry out to dry.

It’s hard work, and soon her hands are ruined and splintering, but Pina’s happier than she might have been otherwise. The woman is not unkind, and she’s always pestering her husband to give this girl some more milk, and a bit of wood for the fire, too, to help her ailing father.

Pina still sneaks out to see the dying donkey. She still cries, burrowing in his fur, when she recognizes who it is.

The farmer’s wife looks concerned, to see her weeping over a work animal, and scrubs her face with a rag as she asks what the matter is.

“We were friends” Pina hiccups, half ashamed and half stunned by this brand of kindness she hasn’t received in a long time. “We went to school together.”

The woman has no tart remark about it. Instead she brightens slightly, and goes to fetch a piece of paper from a drawer. “You went to school? Can you read this for me, then? ‘S about my sister, the one who lives up the hill. I could’ve brought it to the parish priest, but I don’t want him to stick his nose into our business, and he’d try to fool me anyway.”

Pina wipes away her tears and reads, haltingly at first, then with increasingly more confidence, until she’s enunciating every word clearly as she once did on school nights at the fairy’s house.

-

She almost doesn’t notice, the day she wakes up human.

She dreams of the fairy beforehand, sure, but that’s hardly anything new. She always dreams of the fairy. She’s almost always being chastised for something or the other, in those dreams.

So she stretches as she does every morning, and it’s only when she’s rubbing at her eyes, yawning, that she notices something is off.

Namely, that her hands seem curiously soft.

She looks down, blinking. The hard wood has left way for pudgy, fragile flesh, although the latter is still almost the exact shade of light brown it was before.

Pina turns them around a couple times, too stunned to think properly. Then the realization hits her, and she all but leaps out of bed - a new bed - to look into the mirror - a real, _actual_ full length mirror, hanging from a wall whose paint is not peeling away and stained by humidity.

(The new house shocks her more than her new body, if at all possible, and not in a good way – she’d liked the dingy hut it had been. She’s worked hard to make it theirs.)

The girl in the mirror doesn’t look real, but she moves as Pina does, turning this way and that and pulling increasingly worse faces at the glass. Her dimpled cheeks, her big, dark eyes, even the way her hair springs into soft brown curls when teased – it’s too pretty to be real. And there are clothes on the chair to match, a fine dress and soft white stockings and shoes that aren’t made out of tree bark.

She puts them on with trembling hands, and they fit her perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact; she feels more of a doll now that she ever did before, feels the invisible strings tug at her hands and feet as she moves.

The girl in the mirror doesn’t look like her at all.

But what does Pina care? She’s a good girl, now. She’s human. She’s alive.

She ought to be happy as well.

Right?

-

She's walking with her father, still begrudgingly giddy for the novelty of it all, the evening she spots the gaggle of women clustered in an alleyway to her left.

"Father" she says, tugging at Geppetto's sleeve. "Why are those people standing around like that?"

He quickens his pace as though bitten by a snake, dragging her stunned self along even though her short legs can't keep up with him.

"Those" he mutters under his breath, voice harsh and dangerous "are whores. You stay away from them, do you hear me? They'll take you away if you so much as look at them."

Pina's mouth forms a perfect O. The reply is on the tip of her tongue, but her father's glare scares her into silence, eyes trained to the ground as the alleyway fades into the distance.

Still, she steals a glance behind her when he's distracted, and watches as one of the women is pushed into an open door by a burly man, roughly enough to hurt.

There's something familiar to her. Pina looks at her red hair and sees shining eyes, feels a warm, howling baby weighing down her arms.

Something gets stuck in her throat, then, and she dares not look anymore.

-

(Nobody ever talks about what happens after the story’s over.

Nobody ever wonders what will be of the heroine, now that her quest is done with. Surely, one thinks, there’ll be no more trouble for her; surely she’ll live a long, fulfilling life, sowing the seeds she has planted along the way.

Pina’s never had any seeds to plant – the farmer wouldn’t let her touch any of them. All she got were dirty floors and an aching back, and a woman praising her for the things she’d learned.

She should be grateful of the food on their table, of the fact that she can go to school and assist her father in his work along with mending his clothes, but it feels hollower and hollower every day. She finds no joy in any of it, and misses the days where she was a puppet fiercely – there were no expectations to live up to, for she’d already touched the bottom and could only go up.

Now Geppetto watches her like a hawk, alert to any mistakes that might take her back to the start, and she can feel the fairy breathe down her neck as if her mother were here in the flesh, and not just in her nightmares.

She’s beautiful, at last, but what does it matter? The whores were fair of face and fairer of heart, and still they told her stories of men pushing them down into the mud to take what they wanted. The innkeeper’s wife had the jolly look of someone who’s taking all that life is giving them, and still her mouth pressed into a thin line, when her husband was fondling one of the serving girls.

Being beautiful won’t save her – Pina’s got to save herself.

She’s got to stand in front of her mirror, one night, and cut off all her lustrous hair lock by lock until it sits upright, as scratchy as the old one was. She runs her fingers through the stubble on her head, this girl with rope marks around her neck who learnt to spell her name on a cell floor, and vows to take back what she has lost.

The world’s not fair to little girls, but Pina won’t be little forever. If they won’t let her be the puppet, then she’ll be the fire, and she’ll bite and burn whoever tries to touch her again.

She owes it to the girl whose face she wears, after all, to make herself visible, to shout and dance and make friends with teachers and harlots alike until all eyes are turned to her. Her father might scorn her, but if other girls follow her suit, what does it matter? What does it matter, when they can burn down the world and build a better one on its ruins, if someone tries to stop her?

Pina is still enough of a wicked girl to want to see them try, after all.)

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the first installment in a series whose working title should be "naivesilver has qualms about pretty much every decision Collodi's characters ever made". I have long been interested in the story of Pinocchio and in the way it's been portrayed over the years, and I was hoping I could show off some of my personal headcanons and AUs of what could have happened before, during and after the the events of the book. I know it's rather niche, but it makes me happy, so I'm sticking with it.  
> To whoever found this fic: I love you immensely, and I thank you for reading. See you soon, hopefully.


End file.
